Letter to a Friend
March 28, 2022
The little house that Bill and Dot called home, in a section of St. Louis County that was once known as Luxemburg. It is now a “hair studio.”
ALAN writes:
Dear Bill,
I thought I should send you a letter in these waning days of Western Civilization. (Not that that would surprise you. More about this below.)
Nearly twenty years have gone by since you left us. You might not have left us then had it not been for outrageously incompetent hospital staff who hastened your departure.
Forty years have gone by since we last talked, in a brief telephone conversation. I did not realize it would be our last contact, and neither of us planned it that way. But modern life is full of diversions and detours.
It was 1969 when we met, owing partly to a mutual interest in the night sky. In the years afterward, we met and talked at many meetings, lectures, and skywatches involving other amateur astronomers.
You and your wife “Dot” were most kind to that foolish young man. I remember sitting in your living room and talking with you and Dot. I remember stopping at Ella Keller’s corner confectionary at the end of your block, a landmark where generations of neighborhood children bought penny candy. I remember Dot serving us cake and ice cream as we sat around the table in your spacious kitchen. I remember sitting on your back porch and talking with you about astronomy or current events. And I remember walking with you into the garage out back that was headquarters for the sign company that you owned and operated for half a century.
Oh, to get those days back and to express to you the gratitude I owed to you for those many kindnesses and conversations.
I don’t remember you ever talking about your boyhood. Dot told me she grew up just down the street from a foundry in the Carondelet neighborhood in the far southern part of St. Louis. In those years, that block and those around it were home to over 70 families, most of them German, some Italian. Just a few blocks away were a passenger train station and a ferry that crossed the Mississippi River.
I still have the business card you gave me around 1971, with your telephone number beginning with a two-letter prefix. Also have a few snapshots that show you and an astronomer friend and a physics professor seated in a KPLR-TV studio for a discussion program in 1973.
The neighborhood movie house, the lumber company, a landmark restaurant, and the bank in whose upstairs meeting room we often saw each other and talked ….. all are long gone.
Do you remember the summer in the 1970s when you and Dot invited me to ride along with you to a picnic at Carlyle Lake in Southern Illinois? It was a most enjoyable outing. During the ride there, I remember hearing the song “Smile” on your car radio. I had many good reasons to smile in those years, one of which was your friendship.
On some of those evenings in your living room, I benefitted from hearing you talk about political events like the significance of the Watergate fiasco (very different from what the “mass media” claimed), the powers that reside in “the invisible government”, and the role played by groups like the Fabians in engineering events and “accidents” from behind the scenes. You did not trust Kissinger to give us time of day. You introduced me to magazines like The Review of the News andAmerican Opinion and to the books of Antony Sutton, which opened up a whole new perspective entirely apart from the “Liberal” vs “Conservative” false alternative.
My father took a very conservative and skeptical view of political events and trends in the 1960s-‘70s to which most Americans merely assented. You took a similar but even more conservative and skeptical view of those things. In 1978, you sent me a copy of a letter in which you wrote to your correspondent:
“I came around to the idea…that some Occult force, bigger than any ordinary government, must be at work for some reason. I then began to investigate occult forces at work … to change all governments, religions, and economies into a one-world order…”
In conversations or notes, I remember you referred to books like Lady Queenborough’s Occult Theocrasy and Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope, and to the occult significance of symbols on signs in commerce, advertising, and entertainment. You gave me magazine articles I would not otherwise have seen, concerning the vicious attack by Israelis on the USS Liberty and an article by Dr. Robert Faurisson about the so-called “gas chambers.” You were the first grown-up I met who questioned the Official Truth about such things and about the claim that six million Jews were “exterminated.” Any credibility to the “six million” claim vanished for me when I learned years later that that figure had been floated repeatedly by the Jews for many years before they helped to drag Americans into World War II.
I was too young to evaluate the things you said, but in later years it became clear to me that you were absolutely right. I also recall your saying that the “Watchdog Press” is a fairy tale and that presidential elections are effectively controlled behind the scenes by groups like the Fabians. I kept those things in mind years later when I read Rose Martin’s book Fabian Freeway (1966). I recall your saying that while many “Conservatives” may be good people, they are utterly ineffectual in halting the Leftward drift in American culture. Fifty years later: Nothing has changed. They are still ineffectual. I can’t stand “Liberals,” but it is even more taxing to listen to the tepid protests of “Conservatives.”
How you must have laughed when Americans began to embrace a new cultural trend called “public-private partnerships, knowing full well as you did that that is a Communist-engineered scheme to increase the power of the State and weaken a free country.
Of course you and Dot were traditionalist-minded Catholics, appalled by the changes in the Catholic Church from the 1960s onward. The Archdiocesan weekly newspaper St. Louis Review was a “Liberal rag,” you said, and how right you were. I remember Dot expressing her fervent, uncompromising opposition to the modern Catholic Church.
One day in the 1970s I was walking along Olive Street in downtown St. Louis when, by chance, I glanced up and saw you perched on a scaffold as you worked on a sign on the wall of the Super Sandwich Shop diner. We stopped to talk for a few minutes. That building was demolished years ago, and the busy downtown that you remember has degenerated into a nightmare. Today you would see a downtown in terminal decrepitude; the conspicuous absence of people; abandoned storefronts; tall buildings now lifeless, dark, and vandalized; numerous windows boarded up; and fine examples of Communist “art”—which of course are never vandalized. That would be redundant because Communist “art” is the essence of vandalism.
Do you remember the weekend in 1973 when we took a trip with friends Frank and Leo to the small town of Piedmont, Missouri? Residents there had reported seeing mysterious lights in the night sky, a diversion that made a big splash in the two St. Louis newspapers. We went there to investigate those reports. It turned out to be a festival of storytelling. We met the schoolteacher who took a photograph of the night sky from her patio. It found its way into the St. Louis newspapers and generated a lot of talk. She offered us coffee and cookies and was very pleasant. But her photograph did not show anything more unusual than a lens flare that Leo duplicated in this photograph taken at the same location:
It shows a fine example of a classic lens flare, not an Interplanetary Spaceship. (On the other hand, maybe the Aliens build their spaceships in the shape of lens flares in order to fool dumb Earthlings.)
One day you loaned me a tape cassette recording with uplifting songs composed by American patriot George M. Cohan that you had recorded for your own enjoyment. Lawrence Auster heard the same qualities in Cohan’s “Over There,” which he wrote about at View from the Right in 2008 (June 28), five years after you left us and the same year Americans agreed to put a Communist into their White House.
By contrast, today’s “music” would impress you as concentrated noise, today’s popular “entertainment” as concentrated stupidity, and today’s “comedy” as concentrated filth.
Your house is now a “hair studio”–I imagine you would get a good laugh out of that.
In a way, you put me in mind of George Orwell. You were heavier than Orwell and probably could have been a professional football player. The similarities I saw were facial: In each case, an expression suggesting gravitas, nothing frivolous, and an awareness of what life and the world were like and that they probably weren’t going to get any better; and of course that neatly-trimmed mustache.
You and Dot were part of my parents’ generation.
In 1883, William Graham Sumner wrote about a kind of man who “will be found to be worthy, industrious, independent, and self-supporting. He is not, technically, ‘poor’ or ‘weak’; he minds his own business, and makes no complaint. Consequently, the philanthropists never think of him, and trample on him.” Sumner called such a man “The Forgotten Man”, the kind of man who works for a living and “needs no improvement in his condition except to be freed from the parasites who are living on him.”
You and my father were that kind of man: Men who lived quietly, did their job, fought in World War II, played by the rules, obeyed the laws, never sought to run anyone else’s life or business, and never wanted or would have accepted something for nothing.
But the parasites have multiplied. Already in the 1970s you were concerned about all the regulations imposed on small business owners by government busybodies like OSHA. And your small business was precisely one of those that would have been destroyed in 2020 by the totalitarian seizure of power mendaciously called a “lockdown”.
After 12 years or so, we fell out of contact, as friends often do.
I have stood at the site of your final resting place, thinking many of the thoughts expressed above, just across a roadway from my father’s final resting place among hundreds of such gravesites on the rolling green hills of Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in South St. Louis County.
I am thankful that you and Dot are not here to witness the evil of the great Covid Fraud. I can just imagine how you would evaluate the last two years. The USA that you remembered from the 1930s-‘50s is gone forever. Nobody stole it. Stupid white men gave it away. The nation of grown-ups that you remembered from the best years of your lives has degenerated into a nation of gullible fools. You saw it coming, in one form or another, and you were right.
At the same time, I am sad that you and Dot are not here so that I could say to you, Thank You for making possible all the good times we shared.
— Comments —
Joseph Mecca writes:
A magnificent article, “Letter to a Friend.”
It fills one with mixed emotions, sad that it is truth about our modern society, yet a story from the “heart” that gives those of us who understand the transformation that has overtaken us a chance to be so thankful to our Lord that we have the blessings to understand the evil and it gives us the crucial time to pray with much more devotion.
Laura writes:
Great points!
Hurricane Betsy writes:
Men who lived quietly, did their job, fought in World War II
The mistake that led to the ruination of America and other western societies.
God doesn’t ask us to be merely good; He wants us to be smart. The Greatest Generation was not smart.
